How to use the Sony Ericsson LiveView with OpenLiveView and Tasker

Many moons ago, I got my hands on a Sony Ericsson LiveView smartwatch for next to nothing. It’s a product that never sold well due to a multitude of issues, and has since been replaced by the Sony Smartwatch, resulting in a stock of such devices being sold for very cheap all over the world. After trying to make it do anything half useful however, I eventually gave up, and in the process I learned that the Bluetooth stack of my stock ROM Galaxy S II meant that I could more or less wave smartwatches goodbye, due to connectivity issues.

Now I’m on a custom 4.1.2 ROM, and one with a completely different Bluetooth stack. Aside from being compatible with smartwatches in general, an open source project to create a completely new back end app has resulted in OpenLiveView being available on Google Play. It completely replaces Sony Ericsson’s control app, rather than act as a plugin for it. It doesn’t support stock (or any) plugins (yet), but what it does do is give you some very basic features that actually work on your LiveView.

The most important feature (in my opinion) is the ability to forward system notifications to the watch. This means that any toasts (flash messages on the screen) or notifications that the phone gets will be forwarded, with the ability to filter based on message content and apps. As you probably know, Tasker can send both notifications and toasts, and therein lies a ton of potential.

After trying a few different things, I found a setup that works brilliantly. Essentially I’ve set up OpenLiveView to only allow Tasker toasts and notifications through the filter, which means that I have every tool in Tasker available to custom make those notifications- based on notifications from other apps if I want.

To do this, go into OpenLiveView, Notifications, and then click Filter Settings. Hit the Menu button on your device, Select Set Filter Mode, and set it to Whitelist Mode. Then, it the + sign, let it build the app list, and find Tasker. Now you’ve set up OLV to only allow Tasker toasts and notifications through. Note that you need to have enabled Accessibility mode for OLV.

With that in order, there are three ways you can make a notification appear on the LiveView. The most obvious is to just use Tasker’s Notify actions to create a notification, which will then get through the filter. I however prefer to use the Flash action, which sends a toast rather than a notification, meaning that you won’t have any lingering notifications on your device but the watch will still treat it as a notification.

I’ve set up several profiles and tasks based on this. First off, I have a profile that sets the variable %Liveview to 1 when the phone is connected to the LiveView (there’s a context for Bluetooth connections), with an exit task that puts it back to 0. This allows me to make dynamic tasks down to action level based on whether or not the LiveView is available.

For instance, I have a task that is part of my custom Tasker-based todo list app, which checks for items in my shopping list when the Outside profile is activated. Up until now, this has used an audible warning of “You have items in your shopping list” (using the Say action) to warn me if I have anything in the list, with the actual list contents being put on the lock screen. I changed this so that now, when the LiveView is connected, it instead sends the list to the watch, instead of the audible warning. This is simply done by making the existing Say action dependent on %Liveview matching 0, and adding a Flash action with the list contents that is dependent on %Liveview matching 1.

The way this works in practice is that if I leave my house with items in my shopping list, but without the watch, it still warns me with the Say actions. If I do the same with the watch, however, it keeps quiet, but notifies me via the watch, which then vibrates and shows the message. Since this uses the Flash action, no notifications are left behind on the phone.

I also use this to warn me of incoming emails and Google Talk messages. Both of these work the same way, namely by having separate profiles with two contexts: one for %Liveview matching 1, and one event context for a notification with the respective owner application. Tasker has a built-in variable %NTITLE that will contain the title of the last system notification (assuming Tasker has been given accessibility access), and I can then use this to forward at least the title of the notification. With Gmail on Jelly Bean, the notification title contains the email sender, so I forward this by using a Flash action with the message “New email from %NTITLE”. Gtalk message contain both sender and message, so for those I just Flash %NTITLE by itself.

I mentioned there are three ways of sending a notification, and that leaves the last one: by using an intent. I got the info for this from OLV’s XDA thread, and the easiest way to do it is with Tasker’s Run Shell action, using the command from that link:

There are a few things you can change when running this command. Timestamp is, in theory, unix time- meaning time in seconds since 1970. I say “in theory”, because I haven’t been able to make this work, neither with Tasker’s %TIMES variable nor manually inputting unix time. This means that your notifications will show up as being from 1970. However, this method is still useful, because you can specify type, which lets you pick between OLV’s different notification types. To quote the XDA psot:

This means that if you use type 3 as the command above shows, you can access the notification in the Notes section of your LiveView. You can then change the title and content parts of the command (Tasker variables work here) to specify title and contents of your message, and use that to add notes to your watch.

The way I’ve used this is to create a LiveView Note task. What this does is use two Variable Query tasks, one for %Lvntitle and one for %Lvncontent. These variables are then used in the command in Run Shell, which adds the notification as a note on the LiveView. As a final touch, I use a Flash action with “Note added” to add a confirmation on the watch. You can see how this works in practice in the video at the top.

As I’m writing this however, my LiveView days are over. I just got the Sony Smartwatch MN2 in the mail as I was recording the video for this, and in the coming weeks I’ll show how you can integrate that watch’s color touchscreen with Tasker in some very nice ways. Still, I wanted to post this on the LiveView before leaving it behind, since it can be picked for next to nothing these days.

About the Author

Andreas Ødegård was an associate editor at Pocketables. He's more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets and tends to stick with his choice of device for a long time as a result of that. Currently that includes an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

JRDemaskus

Cool you could resurrect a “useless” device.
These wearable devices have been in my eye for a long time.
Happy with my Sony MW1 for now.
Peace

Nick Luther

Hey Andreas do you know of a Way to trigger an Action in Tasker from the liveview ? So that for example i Touch the watch and it activates my wifi Hotspot of the phone ? And another thing i want to ask is Wether the watch can Stay on all the time ? You eventually made me buying this watch ;)
Keep on with your posts and articles i really love them :)

The LiveView is great for the next-to-nothing prices it’s been going for the last year, but the new Smartwatch is the way to go if this is a feature that you really really want

Nick Luther

Hehe okay i like your Way of thinking its the Same i way i do :) ok then i have to ask wether you already managed the widgets to be dynamic in that way that you could actually set a timer with arrows up and down on the widget so you can see the time you set changing to lets say 6 minutes ;)

Andreas Ødegård

You mean on the LiveView or the Smartwatch? Liveview no, Smartwatch yes.Haven’t gotten around to making a widget for timers on the new Smartwatch yet, but it’s quite straight forward to do (relative speaking)

Nick Luther

ohh okay yes i meant the new mn2 that sounds really nice and what about the display it isnt able to stay on all the time isnt it ?or dimmable? then that could be the deal for me

Andreas Ødegård

Not possible. It will turn off automatically after a few seconds. Only way to go with a color screen like that, it uses too much power to stay on to be anywhere near usable in that state. The Pebble is for always-on functionality, but then you can forget about being able to create your own Tasker controlling widgets

Nick Luther

okay i think so too thank you for that infos keep up with these nice news i especially like the ones when you link your ipad and smartphone together and now combined with the watch :) really nice job

Andreas Ødegård

Thanks! And don’t forget that my home automation system and PC are also interconnected with the system ;)

Nick Luther

ohh sorry i forgot about that :P yes i try to do some of these things as well because i really like things that way ohh and btw dont blame me if i missed something out but did you write something about how the link between smartphone and pc works (eventghost?) if you know you could write a little introduction that would be sweet i would appreciate it :)

Andreas Ødegård

I’ve written so much at this point that getting an overview of it all is hard, need to look into a way to fix that.

I’m using Sony Live view device with OpenLiveView and it all works well. I’m using Tasker to send notifications and I would like to send a notification without the device vibrating. I can’t seem to find a way to do it. Anyone got any ideas?